coking

Pluralcokings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The process of making coke from coal by destructive distillation.

   Modern coking captures the gases that older ovens simply burned off.

   The lab ran three test cokings with different coal blends.

   Note

   The process can also be counted. Each run of a furnace or oven is a coking, so a plant report may describe several semi-industrial cokings carried out with different charges of coal, while in ordinary writing the word stays uncountable and names the manufacture as a whole.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of coke.

   The mill has been coking local coal since the 1920s.

   Kerosene-fueled rocket engines must avoid coking in their cooling channels at high temperatures.

   Note

   The silent e of coke drops before -ing. After be it shows the work going on (the ovens are coking), and as a gerund it can name a problem as well as a process: in car and rocket engines, coking means harmful carbon building up where the fuel burns, and engineers design to avoid it.

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